There's something very beautiful about Voyager's journey so far.
I hope one day when we're a true interstellar species we'll still keep tabs on it. The data may not be useful anymore, but it would be cool to imagine a year 3000 society with a little "Look at where Voyager is now :)" tool that you can see its path and where humans have colonized by comparison.
I think a 19 year old yobbo, whose dad is a successful interstellar logistics businessman, who out of a guilty conscience for never having had time for his son and having bought him an overpowered spacecraft, will either put grafitti on it or misjudge his afterburner and half burn it while trying to fly a very tight corner around it, in order to impress the 2 girls he has on board.
I’ve imagined a scene playing out, in sci-fi or for real in the distant future, where astronauts test out a new propulsion system by flying out towards Voyager 1 and catch up to it with ease. As they approach, they see the ancient probe grow larger and larger in their window until…
If my math is correct, we would already need to build a spaceship that can travel at 1/10th the speed of light to reach Voyager 1 within one week. It will be quite an engineering challenge for the future.
$ qalc '24.4e6 km / 1 week / c to %'
(((24.4 * (10^6)) kilometers) / (1 week)) / SpeedOfLight = approx. 0.0134572816%
So this is using the "millions of kilometers per week" as a speed unit (like km/h but bigger), then dividing by the speed of light (c) to get the fraction of c this is, and finally asks it to format it as a percentage
Edit: found a potentially easier (more intuitive to understand) query, giving the same result, as well as how to ask it nearly for the how manyth part of c this is. I'm still learning all the tricks of this tool :)
$ qalc '24.4e6 km / 1 week to c%'
[...] approx. 0.0134572816(%c)
$ qalc '24.4e6 km / 1 week to 1/c'
[...] approx. 7430.92125 c^-1
Ah yes, the first Michael Crichton novel I read - and also the book that first introduced me to binary code (https://imgur.com/N4IjIYq)! And after watching (and then reading) Jurassic Park some 10 years later, it took a while until I realized that it was from the same author...
Yes, I too had the same disparity in recognizing the author as a young 'un, reading CONGO and SPHERE and so on .. Mr. Crichton sure had his finger on the pulse of the technological world we live in. What a wild series of stories he has created .. he was my favourite author until Messrs. Stephenson and Gibson came along ..
Staying on subject, I wonder if we will see a new adaptation of ANDROMEDA STRAIN some time. As a story it seems topical and relevant.
There was a Star Trek: Voyager episode in which Voyager finds one of the original Voyager probes on a planet. The episode is called Friendship One [0].
The plutonium 238 decays according to a curve, and the thermocouples are degraded as well by heat and radiation according to a curve. So the power output drops rather predictably: "The radioisotope thermoelectric generator on each spacecraft puts out 4 watts less each year." [1]
The Voyagers will soon no longer have enough power to operate any of their instruments. They'll have enough power to continue operating the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s. The power of the signal will drop before the electronics and control brown out (if it works as designed), and it the signal might become too weak to detect before the probe completely stops operating. Such a fate befell Pioneer 11, who may yet still be warbling away at low power no longer pointed at Earth; its carrier was last detected in 2003.
Even if science data won't likely be collected after 2025, engineering data could continue to be returned for several more years. The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth.
That FAQ covers a lot of interesting ground (though it talks about 2020 in the future tense).
After Voyager 1 took its last image (the "Solar System Family Portrait" in 1990), the cameras were turned off to save power and memory ...
I didn't realize that was the last image.
... it is very dark where the Voyagers are now. While you could still see some brighter stars and some of the planets with the cameras, you can actually see these stars and planets better with amateur telescopes on Earth.
> the cameras were turned off to save power and memory
Since it’s powered by an RTG, how does the power get “used up”? I assume that this refers to the available power budget at a given moment versus some sort of expendable power reserve.
It's the first question at the top of that ^ FAQ page. One of their comments is :
"Mission managers removed the software from both spacecraft that controls the camera." Makes me wonder if that unused RAM came in handy lately!
It's radioactive so the half-life has a serious effect. Its half-life is 87 years so it's not even used up one. I guess it wasn't really very overdimensioned. But it wasn't meant to last this long.
> the transmitter (which serves as a science experiment of its own) into the 2030s.
One of the longest-running scientific experiments, too. It's already about as old as the Queensland pitch drop experiment was when Voyager I was launched.
Even if you construe this phrase as unequivocally negative, you can't scrub negative emotions and intentions. If you were able to actually scrub some word or phrase from the language, another would take its place, like with all the racial and intellectual disability slurs.
Yes; I'm basically saying one should reconsider before ever using this phrase, as it drips with condescension, and therefore is not conducive to productive discourse.
If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.
Maybe we don't need to go anywhere at all. Maybe we [1] have all we need right here to become literal gods.
[1] Our digital descendants. Humans are very much fit to the gas exchange and metabolism envelope of our gravity well.
> compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans
Unfortunately the simulated classical humans in your Matrioshka Brain will want to mine Bitcoin, which means that our digital descendants will have to become a true interstellar species anyway in order to convert the Laniakea Supercluster into coin-mining computronium.
> If we can harness all of the energy and mass available in our solar system, we [1] can likely compute more than several galaxies full of classical humans. We might even begin to test the edges of physics.
I grant that. But why would that keep us from pressing on?
If we have more resources in general, we will also have more resources for interstellar adventures.
I'm sure we will send interstellar probes of some sort. But I think that assuming we'll want to send lots of entities vast distances in space and time might be a lot like thinking we'll have flying cars.
We already have quite a lot to exploit in the region around us.
We assume we understand our future wants, needs, costs, and capabilities. (Granted, any future thinking is also subject to this, including my own.)
> We already have quite a lot to exploit in the region around us.
I don't disagree.
> We assume we understand our future wants, needs, costs, and capabilities. (Granted, any future thinking is also subject to this, including my own.)
Even if 99.99% of people are content with what the solar system has to offer, there will still be billions left to go and explore and settle outside for whatever needs and reasons they have. Even if those needs are imagined, or the reasons might be purely ideological or religious.
> But I think that assuming we'll want to send lots of entities vast distances in space and time might be a lot like thinking we'll have flying cars.
If only a tiny fraction of people will _want_ this, that's enough.
I hope one day when we're a true interstellar species we'll still keep tabs on it. The data may not be useful anymore, but it would be cool to imagine a year 3000 society with a little "Look at where Voyager is now :)" tool that you can see its path and where humans have colonized by comparison.